Matthew Yglesias Comes Out Forcefully Against The Enlightenment

From Think"Progress" (or is that "Think""Progress"?: Let Children Vote

Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten.

Uh, no. The usual objections would cite John Locke or John Stuart Mill and acknowledge children have insufficient reason to be held responsible for their actions. That Yglesias is seemingly unaware of any such fact, and instead believes children were not voting because of the difficulty in molding them into a coherent voting block - I'm not joking... he actually says that is what he believes is the rationale - really, it's impossible to have an argument with such a person. After all, Yglesias is denying reason itself as being anything other than an arbitrary notion.

I really fear for our civilization. Half of our "educated" classes are morons. I'm sorry folks but intellectual doofism will be our downfall.

A Step Into The Wayback Machine

Remember all the riots that broke out in 2010 because of all those degenerate and violent and racist tea party protests? All the hundreds of arrests? All the hundreds of riot police called out into the street to re-establish public order?

Yeah, me neither.

There are those who are saying the reason for the difference is because the governments involved, like the Oakland City Council, are not just friendlier to right wing causes then to left wing causes, nay!, they are the very source of authoritarianism! (They are also overwhelmingly Democratic. Funny how that happens.)

I'm sorry lefties but the fact that hundreds of Tea Party demonstrations have happened without a single canister of tear gas being fired puts the lie to the claim that our government is simply an authoritarian Leviathan hell-bent on denying us our rights. What it does mean is there is a difference between lawful orderly protest and mob criminality.

And if they think for a second any of this crap is going to generate sympathy for their "cause" they are a lot higher then they ought to be.

Paul Krugman As Outsider

LOL moment of the day:

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”)

This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to take the Left seriously in this country. I'm sorry but in no one's theory of a ruling elite, be it Pareto or Veblen or Weber or Burnham or even Marx, is someone like Krugman not a member of said elite. In order for anything like OWS to be even remotely interesting, and not merely the mass temper tantrum it actually is, they would have to start targeting elites like Krugman. That they cannot even correctly identify him as being a member of the ruling elite says something about their lack of intellectual acumen.

It's Called A Flashback And Not A Flashforward For A Reason

I've not been paying too much attention, obviously, to the various "Occupy" rallies going on hither and yon... mostly because I have a life. I did read this however and thought it worthy of a sympathetic chuckle: The 1960s radicalism of Occupy Wall Street will help elect a Republican in 2012

Photos confirm what I suspected: that most of the protesters are kids looking for their Sixties rush. Naked girls are painted in psychedelic colours. Handsome boys lounge around in cable-knit sweaters. Angry, doomed youth wave signs in the faces of frustrated policemen. Numbers are exchanged; kisses are snatched behind the barricades; disease is spread. This is what every generation of liberal has tried to recreate since 1968, be it the Watergate protests, the Battle of Seattle or the Stop the War Movement. I know this because I, too, once grasped for my 1968 moment. In 2003, I joined the sweaty ranks of the antiwar campaign. I was honestly motivated and intellectually sound, but I can’t deny the heady anticipation that a life of protest would lead inexorably to drugs and girls. I got the drugs but not the girls, and woke up several months later in a squat surrounded by Trotskyite bores who seemed far more intelligent when I was stoned....

Protest is exciting when you are young, and everyone deserves their chance to burn something down. But the political reality is that voters don’t actually want the wheels of Capitalism to stop turning. They don’t want free love or a rainbow nation of stoners. They want a job. That’s why Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have made a big mistake in expressing sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’ve endorsed a happening that is moral in principle but politically toxic. Ordinary voters – the boring, unpretty folks who get up every day and go to work and never once complain – will reject it at the polls. The silent majority will be heard eventually, just like it was back in 1968.

Bingo.

Early Onset Curmudgeondom

I swear, as time goes on I find myself looking at the topics of political discussion displayed at Memeorandum and saying "Oh, go away already. I know what I feel is important in this world, and it has nothing to do with whatever the hell is occupying your tiny little minds."

And I'm not 83. I'm 43.

If I don't see some intelligence enter the fray soon I'm giving up.

What that entails exactly I have no idea. But I'll tell you one thing... this won't be a political blog anymore.